


Anything That Burns

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:51:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I know I'm no doohickey whiz,” says Jane, steepling her fingertips in her lap. “But if you're such a crack techno-gal—haven't you ever thought about trying to hack the collar?” She doesn't say, I'd help. She's not sure that she would, ashamed as she is to think it. In another month, maybe, or two—but there's something to be said for insurance.</i>
</p><p>Or: how an ex-revolutionary teenager gets sent to serve as bodyguard to the Crockercorp heiress, and stuff goes with alacrity to crap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything That Burns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmogyral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/gifts).



The assassination attempts are a fixture from her thirteenth birthday to five months before her sixteenth, at which point they suddenly and without fanfare disappear altogether. No more rigged mailboxes, no more hilarious applications of her father's shaving cream—she even buys cake mix from a rival company, as an experiment, and the chemical analysis turns up, as its “top threat level”, stale nutmeg. It's not just that she's not springing the traps, either, because she sees the drones at the perimeter, looking as puzzled as their flat faces will allow, and since the ceasefire they've been scanning across smaller and smaller stretches for bombs that just aren't there. She almost feels bad for them. She didn't like being almost blown up, or practically impaled, or woken up in the middle of the night by big, bearded men with very small guns in her bathroom—but afterwards she could follow the investigation online, and feel a little flush of pride at seeing her name in the headlines, her photograph at the top of urgent articles. Sometimes they caught the culprit, and then she always got a DVD mailed to her with a recording of the trial. She loved watching the footage of Crockercorp detectives, all in long coats and longer mustaches, taking apart the defense. It's always been Jane's fondest dream that before she comes into her inheritance she'll be able to serve in the ranks of those dangerous men, with their greyhound faces and deceptively affable manner. She doesn't like to puff herself up, but she thinks she'd be good at it, canny: hasn't she survived everything life and revolutionaries have thrown at her, and come out of it with nothing worse than scuffed linoleum?

So in a lot of ways the rebels' new respect for her person is a disappointment. Sure, it makes the day-to-day business of checking the mail and brushing her teeth easier, but security doesn't lighten up, and she feels more than a little silly, taking a motorboat to the grocery store and then trying to peruse the seasonings selection while the pink-haired cashier cowers against the wall. The cashier has a long, bony nose and a rectangular mop of curls that hold dye badly, and Jane would like to talk to her about something juvenile, like the weather or celebrities or the shootings in Gaza; but small chance of that with the drones looming over the counter. It's the first time Jane has left her island in a year. She wouldn't have bothered, she gets supplies by helicopter every month, except, _bored_. Bored and uninterrupted in the business of living.

Probably, that's the real issue. She's gotten used to just-existence feeling like an accomplishment: an uphill struggle against the slings and arrows of tripwires in weird places. And now, for no obvious reason, she's free. If it weren't for the surveillance team making sure she never leaves sanctified zones, and the permanent entourage of giant bug robots, and her father's grateful expression every time she closes a window, she could do whatever she wanted to do. The liberty is stifling. She rewatches her Claw and Order DVDs in chronological order, and then backwards from the start, trying to picture herself in the more climactic scenes, her coat flapping around her ankles and her voice deep and clear. She imagines answering the defense attorney's opening sally with a joke to break the tension and win the jury over to her side. Maybe she could just hit him in the face with a cake? No, that would get her ejected, most likely, and held in contempt of the court. But she could be a martyr for stand-up comedy, remembered afterwards as the visionary who first conjoined slapstick and legal proceedings.

All the detectives sort of look the same, even though they have different names and different colored hair. Jane taps the side of her face and considers muttonchops. “What's all this?” says her father, poking his head halfway through the reverse marathon, and she doesn't turn around, busy following the expressive hands of the lead investigator as he argues for God and country. “My lesson plan,” she says.

 

There is a ship outside her window on the morning of her sixteenth birthday.

She wakes up slowly, sunlight filtering in through tree branches to dapple her white sheets, and for a few minutes she thinks the high whine of the engines might be birdsong. It's been almost a decade since any birds but gulls lived in Maple Valley—salt water in the streets and fish in the bushes will do that to a population—the point is, she doesn't really remember what birdsong sounds like, but the whine seems irritating enough for it. She sits up. Instantly a headache sets in, like a glowing ring around her cranium; the pain is intense but clear as a note off the top of a wineglass. “Fuck!” she says, then feels guilty. When she looks out the window the red mass of the ship hardly registers, until she turns her head and it lenses into focus like a jewel. Then she's on her feet, grabbing a skirt, excitement thudding in her ears right along with the migraine. Her socks go on only once she's at the bottom of the stairs.

“Hey,” she screams, coming out of the house, “halloo, I'm here! Delivery recipient, at your service!” She stops in the shadow of the ship and watches it lower, its belly like a second sky. The gangplank opens with a bonesome sound. In some part of her hindbrain, she's expecting the baroness to come down it: her eyes track the figures emerging from the ship for horns. She hasn't talked to Betty face to face in almost as long as it's been since there were robins in Washington. But sixteenth birthdays are supposed to be special, and no one has tried to kill her for nearly half a year now, and she thought it had to mean something, somewhere along the line.

The person who descends the ramp isn't Betty. Flanked by drones and lightly stepping comes a girl her own age, with hair the shade and texture of cornsilk and long hands that flash across her midriff like a symbol Jane can't decode. A little closer, and Jane sees that her eyes are rosy as a papercut beneath heavily-kohled lids. They sting to look at.

“Hi,” says Roxy Lalonde. At least, Jane assumes: she is wearing a bag with her name on it. Also legwarmers, and a crop top, and the warmest smile Jane has seen outside a television—not affectionate, but full of blistering heat. Around her neck runs a slim scarlet choker that glitters like a liquid in the sun.

Jane is mystified. “Hello?” she says. “It's—Roxy, is it?”

“Yup,” says Roxy, and adds, “but my friends call me Ro-Lal,” which makes Jane stare at her until she drops her outstretched hand. “So!” she says, rubbing her palms together. “This is your place?”

It hits Jane.

“ _You're_ my birthday present?” she says, idiotically, but Roxy is brushing past her, towards the house, her bare shoulder warm and smooth. The drones remain on the gangplank, which is already lifting up off the grass. “Hey, wait, I need—” _a warranty,_ she thinks, _or at least a Terms of Service—_ but Roxy is already inside, through the door she left open in her rush, and Jane really has no choice but to follow her. As she hurries after she can't help but notice that the other drones, the ones who haunt the sidewalks of her island-block, are taking off, rising in formation towards the ship's upper decks. Neighbors she hasn't seen in forever are coming out to watch.

 

The deal is, Roxy explains later, that as Jane gets older and spends more time in the public eye, she's going to need a bodyguard who's less conspicuous and mandibular. More mobile. More photogenic, and Roxy's easy wink over the words is less arrogant than practiced, so that Jane can imagine Roxy in front of a frameless mirror, her mouth steady and her eye closing and closing again. “Not that I have anything against the terminator guys,” says Roxy, sitting with her postapocalyptic magenta Uggs up on Jane's coffee table like it belongs to her, leaning forward to tap the edge. “They do good work.” She has long, slim fingers, twiggy and brown. Jane kind of wants to feel her knuckles for the swell of bone. “But they're not exactly press conference material, you know? _Not_ the dudes you want with you at the punch bar. Unless what is being sold is actual punches, to the face.”

Jane knows. What she didn't know was that there were any press conferences in her future, at all.

“You seem young for it,” she says, cautiously. “With no disrespect meant, I'm sure.”

“I am totally young for it,” says Roxy, her eyes gleaming. “Honestly—you want to know a secret?” She beckons Jane to the area of sofa beside her, and Jane, after a moment, takes a seat. Roxy rests one hand feather-lightly on her shoulder and breathes into her ear, “I used to be part of the Resistance. This is my community service, would you believe it?”

Yes, Jane thinks, in blank astonishment. She turns her head and Lalonde's face is still so close that their noses pass within a hair of each other. “What?” she says, and Roxy sits back, contrite. “Don't worry,” she tells Jane. “I'm reformed. You think they would let me near you if they thought there was a chance in hell of me hurting you?” She taps the choker. “This baby keeps me honest. Not that—” swift, white smile “—I need it, but if I hurt a hair on your head I'd, like, go bald.” And at Jane's doubtful expression: “Because it bumps the pain back onto me? You're rubber, I'm glue, electric shocks from the neckring make me _super_ empathetic?”

“Gosh,” says Jane, “that... doesn't make much sense. How can it instantly measure the discomfort I'm experiencing? —couldn't you kill me painlessly?” It occurs to her that she would be perfectly justified in edging away now, if not running for her weapons cache, but she finds herself sitting and waiting for Roxy's answer. In the living room the light lies lean and yellow on the walls, the shape of the window panes described by narrow rectangles of illuminated wainscoting. Roxy's face, toward her, is sliced by shadow.

Roxy looks troubled. “They gave me a manual,” she says. Jane exhales, as surreptitiously as is possible. “You can have it, obviously, but—it's supposed to sense my intent, and nip any inap _prop_ riate impulses in the bud.” She rummages around in, oh god, her shirt, and comes out with a CD in an unmarked case. Unmarked aside from being all over boob sweat, that is. Jane takes it gingerly. “There,” says Roxy, triumphant, “you can get all the details from the source. I just work here, lmao.”

“Did you just,” begins Jane, and Roxy, with remarkable timing, gets off the couch and makes for the kitchen. “Got anything to drink?” she shouts over her shoulder. Jane hears her rattle open the fridge.

“Milk,” she says, quietly.

She turns the disc over in her hands. Roxy is noisy even when out of sight, her presence insistent and her respect for other people's marbletop-counter domains minimal. Jane listens to her swear at the milk and pour something out into a glass, the mellow glugging musical against the brilliant silence of the morning, and she feels something like peace. Conferences, she thinks. The public. It's clear to her, like a dream remembered in mid-day, that she's spent her adolescence in a stupor—paralyzed by the need for self-preservation. She may never be a licensed PI, but the world is waiting for her anyway, anxious to be solved.

Her father comes downstairs. He's dressed for work: it's only 8 A.M. “Jane?” he says, and she looks at him, surprised. For a moment she had forgotten she was still in her own home. “I had a,” she says, and on cue Roxy materializes in the doorway, glass of milk in hand. “Delivery,” Jane finishes, lamely. Roxy beams.

“You must be Mr. Crocker,” she says. Is it Jane's imagination, or is she sticking out her hip? Certainly she's resting her weight against the doorframe, holding her milk at elbow height and her sleeve wadded as padding between her shoulder and the frame. Jane is abruptly and furiously aware of the S of her long flank, her tapered thighs.

“Dad, this is Roxy,” she says, over her embarrassment. “Roxy... Dad.”

Her dad regards them both with searching eyes, shaded by protruberant hatbrim. “Hello, Roxy,” he says. He sets down his briefcase and makes as if to shake hands, but Roxy waves the milk, as if to say, _no can do, you've got a job to do, I've got a job to do, but later, boy, later there will be a meeting of palms,_ or Jane is going crazy. Anything is possible. Her dad stops in his tracks, halfway across the living room, his chest rising and falling under his lapels. “Jane, what's the weather like?” he says levelly, in defiance of the sunlight honeying the floor. It's their are-you-being-abducted codephrase. Jane wants to sink between the couch cushions and die, especially because not ten minutes ago she was wondering that herself. “Great,” she says, “the weather's great,” and he nods, satisfied. “Happy birthday,” he says. He tips his hat to Roxy and gets his briefcase and walks out the door.

Roxy glances at her. “Do you have video games?” she asks.

 

That night, Jane plays through the manual.

Her birthday festivities are a low-key affair, albeit higher-key than ever previously. Her father baked his usual five cakes, and Roxy, horrifyingly, samples four of them, macerating through frosting like a starved whippet, and looking at Jane from under her lashes with her face held close to her plate. Also the normal run of presents, teleported into her lap to the tune of the official Crocker jingle. “ _You sweet talker—Betty Crocker!_ ” Roxy makes a funny, knowing face, like, 'you and me, we know better than to be suckered into happiness by cutesy tunes and weirdly sexual doggerel', and Jane, despite herself, wrinkles her nose in involuntary answer. Which doesn't stop her from opening her presents, a moment later, with her customary reverence, even though it's just (always) gift cards, joke books, Crocker merchandise and logo-stamped clothing.

And a note. “I'm tired,” she says, making eye contact with her dad and with Roxy, as reassuring as she knows how to be. “I think I'm going to tuck in early. Since someone got me up at the crack of dawn today, ha ha—” Roxy pretend-abashed, Roxy's gaze bright.

Of course she would be ironic about the jingle: she was a Resistance fighter. Jane climbs the stairs and downloads the contents of the disc. Do you want to execute? She hesitates, and puts in headphones. Y.

The opening shot is of the baroness, sitting alone in an unlit documentary chamber. Against the backdrop of hot pink curtains she reads tired, in a benevolent alien kind of way, and bored. The bags under her eyes are shadowed purplish and her eyes are themselves shot with fractured vessels. “Janey,” says Betty, bared teeth like barnacles in the whale-gray meat of her gums. “Digging your present? There were hecksa candidates, plus a stringent screening process, I can a-freaking-shore you.” You couldn't have screened out the criminals? Jane thinks grimly, listening. “No, seriously, this chick is badass. Y'know, I interrog—interviewed her personally?” She lets out a low whistle.

Since when did the baroness give interviews to insane conspiracy theorists, Jane wonders. Actually, since when did the baroness give interviews to anyone? She pauses the video and looks at the note in her hand. The ink is dark and brownish, the writing scratchy. It says: _buck the shell up, kid_.

Resume.

“'Course, the brain controllin' collar thing means she has to do anyfin you tell her to, even the lame things, which I know you'll have a lot of, but...”

Pause, again. “What?” says Jane, out loud.

She closes her laptop, and then opens it. She gets out of her desk chair and walks a rough circle around her carpet. Outside, the moon is caught in dark branches, round and white as a dead eye. The sky is deeply blue. She can hear herself breathing, slow and sharp, and on one methodical hand she counts the number of real conversations she's had in a year with a person who was not her father and was not a faceless tutor, communicating with her over Skype from somewhere on the other side of the world, their connection too crappy for vidchat.

She sits back down and plays the line again.

“...anyfin you tell her to...”

Otherwise, it's pretty much as Roxy said. No harm, no intent to harm. Roxy is apparently trained in the use of bitchin' arms and in the use of fists on the ends of arms, and a short clip of Roxy killing a man with a pair of chopsticks convinces Jane that she's probably fit to protect her from any single-bodied human threat, even if it's not really clear what Roxy would do against the kind of attacks that have been leveled against Jane in the past, insidious and subtle. The drones were no good for those either, though. Jane, perhaps because she lacks an alternative, is just plain hard to kill.

She's also angry. At Betty, she thinks, it has to be at Betty that she's mad, her vaunted ancestor who dumped a mindslave and an ex-convict in her unready lap. But Jane tries to be as honest with herself as she is scrupulously intolerant of blatant lies in everyone else, and Roxy did, after all, lie to her. Had said, here is the whole nature of the thing, and then told her an eensy fraction of it. The real deal. Did she think she needed to con Jane into being a decent human being? Well, and why wouldn't she, when she's suffered who-knows-what before being gifted to a stranger like a puppy—but Jane can't work herself into righteous indignation on behalf of Roxy, who dyes her hair white-gold and looks, when you get down to it, like a thief. Jane doesn't want to think of herself as an uncompassionate person, god knows, but numb and baffled and unwarned, she sits silently for a long time after the video has reached its end.

When she kicks the chair around on its axel Roxy is watching her.

“You didn't tell me,” says Jane, which is not what she meant to say. Roxy looks confused, and says something, inaudible. Jane pulls her headphones off and glares at Roxy, daring her to laugh, but Roxy repeats, serious: “Tell you what?”

Wordlessly, Jane rewinds to the section on control.

Roxy listens, her posture careful. At one point she raises her hand to touch her choker, slipping two fingers in between it and the side of her neck, the flesh permitting. Jane looks away from the shadow of her crooked knuckles on her throat. “Uh,” she says, “sorry? I pre much thought you knew.”

Off Jane's look, “No, I kid you not.” It's impossible to read her tone. She sounds sincere, or desperate, or disinterested. She leaves the wall and starts to pace the same route Jane was taking earlier, the swing of her legs passing furniture and dust bunnies and secret floorboards full of pranking equipment with equal indifference. At least she's taken her boots off, and probably left them somewhere in the hallway. “Look,” says Roxy, clenching one hand to her own sternum, “I didn't know it was going to be like this. She interviewed me. Not the other way around.”

“I don't understand you,” says Jane. Her heart hammers her ribs. The headache is worse, pressing and intimate. She tries to rest her forehead on her knuckles and Roxy stops her, catches her face with two hands and, bending down, begins to massage her temples with slow thumbs. Jane doesn't move. “No one really knows how you live,” says Roxy, as if talking to herself. “The heiress. The girl in front of the throne your space mom's behind. You should hear some of the stories they tell—there are people who think you live in the Louvre, chillin' with Mona Lisa and high fiving de Milo.”

“She doesn't have any hands,” Jane says. “I know,” says Roxy. “It was a joke.” Her grip is very sure. Jane pictures Roxy pulling her skull off, pop, like uncorking a bottle of champagne, blood running everywhere down the front of Roxy's slouch-shouldered shirt. She closes her eyes and the pain recedes in waves, pushed out by darkness.

“I've always been under the impression that you people had an excellent sense of my whereabouts,” she says, for lack of anything else to correct.

Roxy's thumbs stop, then start again. “Well,” she says, “the Resistance isn't so great at unified action. Wasn't. I don't know. Mostly there were a lot of people shouting at each other in rooms without AC, you know? Or making up dumb rumors about nice kids. I heard a story about you once, must have been years ago, you would have been like twelve, and this guy told me that the U.N. was sending you party favors. Trying to win you over. The story was, you received Ms. Secretary Whoever in your luxurious private suite, ha ha, and she looks right, she looks left, she says Miss Crocker under ordinary circumstances we would never consider doing this but these are strange times, do you understand me? And the story goes she gets out a chest of a hundred matched blue pearls, and says, a token of our esteem, and you take it from her and shake it and say thank you very much, Ms. Whatsyourface General, and then you ask her, real polite, sitting there in the middle of all this luxury with your lap full of oyster vomit—you ask, what can you bake with these?”

Jane jerks indignantly, but Roxy's palms are warm on either side of her head. The heels of Roxy's hands push up her cheeks. “I know, right?” says Roxy. “Where would the U.N. even get a fucking jewelry box? They were strapped wayyyy before yo momma came on the scene.”

“She's not my mother,” says Jane. Roxy laughs, softly, the rough noise like waves.

“Whatevsies,” she says.

They are both quiet for a while. Jane opens her eyes, and from the corner of her vision sees the maple leaves brushed silver by moonlight, crisp on dark stems. “There's another version of the story,” says Roxy, “where it's just one pearl, one huge, egg-size pearl, this thing came shining out of the butt of a baby quail, and in that version you aren't fucking around. You take the pearl off her and go to your sweet-ass superkitchen, with all the trimmings. You pour a cup of what looks like water. And you come back and drop the pearl in the glass, and it dissolves in front of her.”

Jane can see it vividly. Visualizes herself: standing in a kitchen whose size belies its gloom, smiling and wearing a pale smock and dropping riches into acid. “I would never do that,” she says.

“Well,” says Roxy, “I know that now. I met you.” She smooths Jane's bangs and steps back. In the photographic blue dark Jane sees her tip her head up, unconscious-seeming, small.

“Why did you come to my room?” Jane says suddenly. She assumed her father would show Roxy to the guest room, with its newspaper-covered chairs. Something in the flicker of Roxy's eyes makes her think he did, in fact, show her, but all she says is, “What kind of bodyguard would I be if I didn't watch you creepily while you slept?”

“Golly, I don't know,” says Jane, “how about, a remotely ordinary one,” and Roxy cackles at her until she can feel the headache starting to come back. Only then does she think about how thoroughly it was gone. She gets up; her knees are stiff. “This is completely unnecessary,” she says. Roxy shakes her head.

“It'd be breaking my contract if I didn't,” she says.

“Fine. Then tomorrow we can move another bed in here, and you can sleep on it then.”

“Great,” says Roxy. “And tonight I'll just curl up on the rug, 'kay?” Jane honestly can't tell if she's being sarcastic, but she drops to the ground by the door with every appearance of satisfaction, her body loose and taking up a surprising amount of space when she curls up against the foot of the entranceway. Jane stares at her with some trepidation and then, resolute, turns to change into her pajamas. Behind her she hears Roxy begin to snore.

 

“It's ludicrous,” she tells her dad at breakfast. It's Saturday, and he only works afternoons on Saturdays. Roxy is still snoozing in her room. Jane practically had to play Twister to get out without stepping on some outthrust extremity. “What are you, a prison warden? And everyone knows the dangers of allowing jailer's daughters contact with the jailees, I hope. I don't know what she was thinking.”

Her father rarely offers comment on the antics of his adoptive grandmother. He gazes at her now over the top of his newspaper, pipe clamped firmly between teeth. “Mm?” he says, eyebrows raised.

Jane helps herself to another slice of leftover cake. “Also, that collar is downright inhumane. Obviously something had to be done—some guarantee of safety—but a telepathic choke-chain? Barbaric, and I can say that. I'm the one it's protecting.”

“Hmmm.”

“There's nothing to do but be kind to her, I suppose.”

“Actually,” says her father, folding his paper, “I'm glad she's here. You see, Jane, this morning I received notice that I'm leaving on a business trip. The flight's at four.”

Her father persists in referring to rides-by-warship as flights. He takes a motorboat to work and calls it his commute and if he could he would take off his shoes and find a metal detector to walk through before boarding a giant gravity-defying battleboat. She thinks it's sweet how he tries to preserve things she doesn't remember, tries to retain the rituals without managing to salvage any of the sense. Sweet, but also somehow hopeless, as if they are the last traditions to be had in a ruleless world. Jane looks through the window to the channels of seawater that have replaced the broken concrete streets, the sidewalks that drop off into blue waves, and she can't sympathize, really, with his nostalgia. The most unreasonable thing in her universe is that another girl is sprawled over her carpet like a giant cat, and that has nothing to do with the boundary of ocean and sky. Though it occurs to her to wonder: does her father imagine their normal detail of drones would have left even if Roxy had not arrived at the same time? It's a silly thought, but it sticks at her like fear.

“How long is the trip?” she asks.

“Two weeks,” he says, “give or take,” which means take. She nods, then stops nodding. “I'll miss you,” she says, awkwardly. “Do you really think she's—”

He kisses her on the crown of her head. She shuts up. “I am so proud of you,” he does not say.

Roxy seems distressed about his departure, which makes Jane feel a little better about it. At least she won't have to be wigged out by Roxy throwing herself at him. “What, he has to leave right this minute?” Roxy says. “It's your birthday! Day after your birthday. So even more important than your birthday, right?” When his ride arrives she stands behind the curtains and pretends to read one of Jane's old Nancy Drew books, and Jane, belatedly, cottons on to the fact that Roxy is pitiable—not just in theory but in the freckled flesh, dark melanin deposits almost like moles scattered across the bridge of her nose and down her forearms. The plastic choker glints like a seam, two inches above the base of her throat and displacing small hairs on her skin. It's the sort of thing that could kill a seagull, left lying on a beach for vermin to chew, tangling around naked bird feet. Jane can't see a hinge.

“I don't mind,” she says. “It'll be nice to have some time on my own.”

Instantly, Roxy switches to sunny enthusiasm. “Yeah, yeah!” she says. “We're going to have so much fun.”

“You are the worst detainee,” Jane tells her, and Roxy takes three quick steps until they are a foot apart and the air between them is dazzlingly hard. “Or the _best,_ ” says Roxy, and Jane, for a long moment, doesn't inhale; worried that she'll find that she's swallowing diamonds, or oil, something to rend her from the inside out.

* * *

They go sailing.

“We're doing what?” says Jane, when Roxy proposes it. For the last three days they've been holed up in her room, playing videogames on the multiplayer setting that Jane has never had the chance to try out. Roxy is better than Jane, not surprisingly. Roxy plays with what Jane thinks of as guerilla fervor, her lower lip between her teeth and her controller held at arm's length, but level, spinning it left and right along a still axis. She picks weird, incongruous characters, with animal heads and human bodies, and Jane doesn't comment on her names, which are either unrecognizable or just unrecognizably misspelled. Jane has a backlog of lectures to watch and essays to write and problem sets to attempt, but instead she spends her afternoons watching Roxy fight nonexistent enemies from a fixed position at the foot of the bed. She imagines her tutors are panicking, or else don't know. She wouldn't be surprised if the grading were automatic after all. Roxy looks at Monday's calculus assignment, just once, her face blank and her eyebrows arched, and she finishes it standing up. After that Jane doesn't show her and doesn't look at the work herself.

“Sailing,” says Roxy. “I mean, if you want.”

“We don't have a sailboat,” says Jane, patiently.

“We can rig one up,” says Roxy.

Rigging one up turns out to mean tying a tablecloth to a plunger and planting the plunger at the nose of the motorboat. “I'm... pretty sure we're just creating drag,” says Jane, while Roxy clambers back over the hood and drops down to stand next to the wheel.

“But now we look 90% cooler,” she says. “It's like a cape for a boat. You can't tell me that's not awesome.”

“I most certainly can,” says Jane, under her breath. Roxy is steering them down Fir Drive, the boat's wake widening and bridal. It's possible Jane should be worried, but Roxy's hands are deft on the wheel and they're not obviously tacking towards the half-submerged houses. If they run aground on a picket fence, well, they'll probably deserve it. At the stern, the tablecloth flaps checkered-red in the wind. In the snapping and billowing of its length Jane thinks she glimpses meaningful shapes, long twists like words, the echo of a bat against the sky. She takes a seat on top of the cooler and rests one elbow on the railing, legs crossed. Roxy smiles at her. Her coif has disintegrated after five minutes' exposure to the breeze, tufting around her chin like a moulting bird, and Jane has a terrible urge to coax it down, with intent fingers, drawing it lock by pale lock back into place.

Says Roxy: “Where to, captain?”—and Jane says west.

It doesn't take very long to get beyond the suburbs and into open sea, although somewhere not far below them is the nice old town of Maple Valley: its pleasant lanes a route for tuna, and the empty carcasses of Priuses parked beneath drifting kelp. To her right Jane can still see the ragged line of her neighbor's rooftops. There was some shifting of tectonic plates involved in their preservation, some moving of the earth. She asked about it, on her eighth birthday. The Condesce brusquely said, “Anything for you, kiddo;” to which remark Jane could muster no reply. Afterwards she looked at pictures of the new undersea cliff, the split between counties carved out as by a gilded fingernail. She stood over her laptop and googled 'global warning' and 'acts of god', one hand cupped lightly over her mouse.

Roxy kills the motor. “Let's just drift awhile,” she says. Jane doesn't argue. She packed six sandwiches and she hands one to Roxy—can tell without looking which one is Roxy's because it's leaking through the bag. Jane offered to make it for her, believes she knows after three days what Roxy likes in a lunch, but Roxy said, nah, I _love_ putting stuff on bread, and proved it by sweeping application of the bear-shaped honey bottle. “Die, ursine scum,” she muttered, pumping its plastic midsection while Jane stared at the ceiling. Now she bites into her soaking lump with a noise like someone's hand being crushed—was there cereal in there as well? Jane, meditatively, starts on her own sandwich, and tries not to think of shattered carpals.

They eat in silence under the blue-white sky. There is wafting mist and a porcelain quality to the cloudless parts. The sun reminds Jane of knives overhead, catching light from outside and pouring it over her pillow in the dead of the night. She doesn't ask, what was the point of this excursion? She's felt it too: cooped-up and spoiling like milk from the heat. Her sandwichmeat, salmon, flakes delicately in her mouth.

 

When they get back, the invitation is waiting in Jane's inbox. The header reads: YO C)(ECK T)(IS OUT. It has attached the time and date of a state dinner with cocktails beforehand, to be held at an address Jane can't make sense of until she realizes that Olympia is a city, not a mountain. On her bed, packages are stacked that weren't there when she left. Roxy remains at her doorway, poised to enter but with hesitation printed on her face, which Jane understands. “Come in,” she says, “I think some of these are for you.” She shakes out a mulberry-colored sheath, pushing aside tissue, and checks the size. “Definitely for you.”

Roxy teeters. “What's the occasion?”

“Good question,” says Jane, whose actualfax birthday presents are all stuck in her closet, bar Roxy, and for good reason; they're not exactly first-rate, much as she might have coveted that Crocker-stamped beanie a few years ago. “Apparently we're invited to a cocktail party with politician hors d'oeuvres, but I haven't a clue what we're supposed to be doing there.”

“Oh, that's easy,” says Roxy, surprising her. “Publicity, like I said—she's going to start showing you off now that you're old enough to, like, complete sentences and stuff.”

“Excayuse me,” says Jane, and is rewarded with a wink. She frowns at the larger, unopened box. “So you think they'll want to talk to me?”

“Sure,” says Roxy, watching her.

Jane has a feeling, as though the ground beneath her is shifting—as if, perhaps, she's standing on the back of some enormous, living thing, ready and eager to turn over and upend her whole house, spilling the contents of her bedroom out into the sea. She touches one socked toe to the inside of her ankle. “I haven't done anything,” she says.

“You started that charity,” says Roxy. “The whatchumacallit. With booncollege.”

“Yeah...” says Jane. She takes off the lid of the box. Inside, laid out like a burial shroud, is a violet-blue suit, a light blue waistcoat of raw silk. Jane touches it wordlessly. “Hey,” says Roxy, over her shoulder, “it matches your eyes.” Jane starts and turns. Roxy's collar is very close to the corner of her eye, the pendant bright as coral, and she lurches forward, suddenly nauseous, static coming off the dry smoothness of the suit and leaping from narrow lapels up through her arms. “Hey,” Roxy says again, catching her, but Jane tears away. The pain in her noodle is worse than she's ever felt it. “I need,” she starts, and flees mid-sentence, unspoken object floating in her wake.

Roxy finds her seated and fully dressed in the bathtub, head between her knees. This time she doesn't lay hands on Jane. She just sits down on the other side of the tub's white wall, cross-legged, not looking at Jane or at anything else. Earlier that week she asked, “Have you tried medication?” Jane has. Sometimes it works, but Jane hates, more than anything, the hope, swallowing the pill and feeling it sink through her muscular esophagus and waiting for it to relieve her.

“There's a story,” says Roxy now, “about the king of the monkeys, who got up to all kinds of business. He scratched his name out of the Book of Life and Death, you know? This guy, he could survive anything. Some people didn't like that, obviously. Immortal monkeys can be real buzzkills. One time, he was trapped under a mountain for five hundred years. Can you imagine?”

Jane doesn't reply. She can see her reflection, kind of, in the polished bottom of the tub, a pastel shadow with dark eye sockets. She moves her arms to cover her neck and sees the shape of her outline change.

“But he got out,” Roxy continues, “in year five-o-one, mind you. He had a heck of a time about it. There was a monk named Xuanzang, doing some basic pilgriming in the nearbyish vicinity, and this monkey was like, aw, yeah, I'm going to get me a piece of that, so he begged his keeper to let 'im serve Mr. Monk for the duration of his pilgrimage. Community service,” says Roxy, with a smile. “Keeper says, okay, but on one condition: you wear a magic 80s headband, and it shrinks when Xuanzang says so. Monkey's like, sure, whatever, a fashion sense ain't nothing to freedom, right up until the first day Xuanzang wants him to stop doing something, and then he practically keels over, can't stand because the headband is so tight, feels like it is slicing through his skull and making flank of his fresh monkey brains.”

“Is this supposed to be comforting?” says Jane.

“No,” says Roxy. Absently, she strokes Jane's open hand.

 

Friday, 6 pm. Neither of them brings up the possibility of not attending, and they dress on opposite sides of the same room. Earlier that week, Jane tried to have a serious conversation with Roxy about the compulsion placed on her by the collar, and about how she, Jane, would never take advantage of it. Did Roxy believe her? Roxy said yes she did. Roxy looked at her with pity. Now Roxy is fumbling over stockings, the light picking out small hairs on her brown thighs. Although Roxy's body hair is actually dark, visible even without the glint of lamplight, and Roxy's roots are turning dark too, the longer she stays with Jane. Roxy rolls the stocking up her leg as carefully as if she were putting together a gun. She has an actual gun, a little white thing in a thigh holster, but the line of it is invisible under the volume of her skirt.

Jane has already dressed; all that remains is the bowtie, starkly red. She's wrestling with it in growing agitation until, suddenly, Roxy comes up behind her and drapes her arms over Jane's padded shoulders. Jane tenses, but Roxy says, “Come _onn_ ,” low and dragging, and does the bow up in three quick loops. For a moment they stand like that, Roxy at Jane's back, breathing through her nose. The movement of the air prickles Jane's neck. Roxy steps away, finally.

“Slowpoke,” says Jane. She straightens her lapels.

Roxy says, “Sorry.” She finishes up.

They've been sent a driver, whose claws curl around the wheel of the car and whose features are lost in shadow beneath a red-edged cowl. “Lesgo,” crows Roxy, practically throwing herself into the back seat, and Jane follows at what she'd like to think is a dignified remove. The invite, printed out on her dad's scanner and folded to fit into her breast pocket, feels strangely tangible through the material of blouse and jacket; she keeps reaching up to secure it with one hand. Roxy throws an arm over her shoulder, not resting there but balanced on the back of the seat, so that bare inches separate the inside of her arm from Jane's nape. Jane doesn't know what to say. The car takes off with a noise like razor—presumably one shaving the dark star-stubbled cheek of the night, etc., etc.—a sound so jarringly intimate it wipes out every thought.

It was an hour's drive from Maple Valley to Olympia back when groundcars were still a viable means of transportation along the Western Seaboard, but the car they're in goes a lot faster than that. There's no traffic. Jane can't see the ocean except as an absence of stars, beginning past an inferred horizon. Still, the pendant on Roxy's collar glows in the hollow of her throat, warming translucent flesh and fine red veins. Jane studied chick embryos in 6th grade, did a science project on them that no one but her father ever saw, and viewed the little forming hearts inside their shells, cracked yellow yolks. Like them, the place where Roxy's collarbones sit under skin is dangerously naked. Roxy turns to her and whispers, “If I dropped something over the side, you think we'd hear it splash?” and Jane says, “What on earth would you drop?”

They arrive late anyway. Maybe it's purposeful; Betty could easily have sent the wrong time to ensure that Jane would only get there when she wanted her. The building was raised after the floods, and has a golden roof, a front of pillars, steps descending into the water that is held off from three of four walls by low earthen dike: a sort of reverse moat. The glow from inside scatters across an arc of exposed waves, burning facets orange over blue, and Jane's tongue feels a little swollen in her mouth, pulse fluttering in her cheek like a bug. She can't remember the last time she was this far from home. She offers Roxy her arm and Roxy takes it, glittering, her lashes a black sweep at the corner of each eye, and they stroll into the party like they were made for it.

Inside, it's not as bright as the light spilling down the stairs would indicate. The front hall is enormous, half the building is devoted to this one room, and the chandeliers are spaced too far apart on the ceiling to do much more than turn the shade apricot-warm. And, like the light, people occupy the room without filling it, drifting in clusters across the terra cotta tiles. Some turn and raise their heads, but it's impossible to tell if they're looking at Jane and Roxy or beyond them, to the ocean, their faces blurred by candle-shine. The pit of her stomach is cold. “Tough crowd,” murmurs Roxy, as they go out onto the teeming floor. They are, by decades, the youngest people there.

If she expected anything, she supposes she was banking on something like in movies from the 40s, a mingling mass of extras, pale faces surging in a black sea of formal dress. Not men and women keeping to the walls like refugees, rarely peeling off their designated group, flinching, sometimes, at an unexpected noise. Things were tinklier in _Casa Blanca._ She toys with the idea of saying, Roxy, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but gives it up after trying to picture Roxy with Louie's mustache. Not everyone has the gift.

Someone taps her on the shoulder. It's been five months and a week since the last assassination attempt; Jane jumps anyway. “Sorry,” says the tapper, a woman in a black suit skirt with red hair drawn back painfully straight, and fine, pale features under the almost bald sculpting of her eyebrows. Roxy is staring at her with undisguised wariness. In return, the woman offers her a lipless smile. Her nametag says, 'Cordelia', no last name. “Sorry, but are you Jane? Jane Crocker? It's an honor.”

Slowly, Jane shakes her hand. “Well, shucks,” she says. “No one's ever said that about meeting me before.”

Cordelia's teeth gleam. “It's just a rare opportunity, isn't it? You're rather reclusive. Historically speaking.”

“I daresay I'm not old enough for historical speaking,” says Jane.

Laughter. Other adults are now converging on her, the track having been beat by Cordelia's courage. Jane imagines wolves gallumphing over a flat trail of snow, and almost laughs at the sudden shocking cold of the picture, in all this muted warmth. Roxy relaxes a little, at her side, even though there are more questions coming now, paired with introductions. It's a good thing they have name tags. Jane might feel self conscious about not having one herself, except it's apparent they all know her—have all guessed.

The conversation itself is not what she expected. No one presses her to know what she's done for the world or the species, with her presumed fabulous wealth and network of connections in the most highly valued company on the planet. Instead she fields questions about AP calculus, her family history, her favorite color. Red, she says. Her audience takes notes.

At some point she begs off to get a cup of punch. “Sheesh,” says Roxy, following her, “what a bunch of tail-hangers.”

“Yes,” says Jane, ladling punch into a champagne flute. Some spills over her fist. “Crocker, you are a waste a fluid,” says Roxy in disgust, and Jane smiles.

Her disapproving bodyguard ends up drinking most of her punch regardless, nabbing the glass after emptying her own. She then promptly declares herself in need of “a quick chat with a man about a horse's ass” and drags Jane with her, instructing her sternly to wait outside. “Okay, mom,” says Jane, and Roxy's eyes narrow to beryl slits. “And don't you forget it,” she says illogically, then vanishes into the restroom.

There's a sort of lounge area, serving as an airlock between the vaulted atmosphere of the hall and the fluorescent void of the stalls and tile. Couches, fig trees; even, to Jane's disbelief, a stack of home improvement magazines. Could it be that this is actually a portal to someone's magical dentist's office? She flips through the uppermost of the stack, a two-year-old spread on how to renovate your kitchen, and looks up to see herself reflected in a mirror she'd barely glimpsed, covering the whole wall. The room is somberly upholstered, carpeted in green and walled in black marble, and its image had looked at a peek like mere space. But no, there she is, standing with her hands full of glossy sheets and her eyes startlingly blue behind her glasses: the color of oleander, nodding on the bough.

She sits down more heavily than she means to. She can hear Roxy vomiting in the next room over, and she thinks, dispassionately, _the punch_ ; and, it's affecting me too. There is a gelatinous clarity to her consciousness. If she ends today by dragging her so-called bodyguard out from under the door of a stall, it will perhaps be no less than she signed up for by coming here at all, to this place full of the evidence of loss. She can hardly stand to think about the people in the front hall directly, their coward glances and sideways routes through the room, the way they seem aware of the space unfilled in a fleshy, carnal way. Jane isn't stupid, and though she was born into a world that was already past the point of no return she's still observed it changing, curling to consume itself. But there are gaps in her memory, in her understanding, inexplicable holes through which the wind whines like a flutist handed a gun. She can't remember what her father's expression was when he left. Was she really not looking at him? Did she not even watch his back and shoulders as he climbed the gangplank to be taken away?

Cordelia comes into the lounge.

Jane, lost in her own thoughts, smiles awkwardly at her. Cordelia smiles back, then slams a hand over her mouth and pushes her head back against the top of the sofa. “Not a word,” she breathes, so quietly Jane might not know what she said, if she didn't have a clear view of those flushed lips. Her hand's grip on Jane's jaw is strong enough that this seems like kind of a moot injunction, but Cordelia is holding a knitting needle, sharpened like a child's candy cane to a wicked, fragile point, and Jane doesn't make a sound. Just breathes through her uncovered nose and watches the tip of the needle.

Cordelia places it, deliberately, at the thin blue flesh beneath Jane's eye, just pricking skin. Then she removes her hand. “Stand up,” she mouths, “ _slowly_ ,” not that Jane needs telling. She rises as far as the needle allows, stops, rises when the needle moves again. She almost loses her balance halfway up, arms wheeling, but Cordelia catches her wrist and grins with all her teeth.

With the slow, trapped lucidity of the drug, Jane thinks, My first kidnapping. Unless she cries out, in which case it will be her first murder. Her eye, against her will, is trembling, all the small muscles that control her vision aflutter, and her sight suffering for it. She inches up to verticality like a drawbridge and, once there, drops to the floor.

“Roxy!” she screams, dodging back from Cordelia's answering lunge. “You little bitch,” Cordelia snarls, tackling her. But close-up isn't good for sticking things in people, and they roll around on the soft green carpet, struggling with hands and knees for an opening. The needle snaps when Cordelia misses Jane's eye and ends up stabbing rug. Jane hears Roxy's footsteps, and hears them stop, hears Roxy's wet, panting breaths, and the desperate rustle of skirts—she thought that thigh holster seemed stupid—she bursts upwards, and Cordelia gets two hands around her throat, forcing her down.

“I'll kill her,” Cordelia is saying, crazily, from an enormous distance, seated now on Jane's chest and thumbs crushed against Jane's windpipe. “I'll kill her, I'll kill her, _get away from me—_ ”

The gun goes off four times.

Jane rips her hands away before the echoes have died off the walls, before the ivory fingers have stopped spasming. There is not much head left. She sits up, corpse toppling half off her in an ungainly heap, and looks down at her front. Not much blood got on the blouse and waistcoat, but the knees of her pants are spattered, already soaking dark, and she can feel a cool lacy smear of something on her cheek. She lifts her fingertips to touch her temple and they come away glazed with red.

She turns. Cordelia slides the rest of the way off at the motion. Roxy is standing with her feet widely planted, the hand holding the gun lowered to her side. She's bent over, a little, other arm across her stomach, her mouth wet from vomit. “You're the first person I've ever met who upchucks _before_ killing someone,” says Jane, ignoring the fact that her sample group consists of herself, and that she pushed a man off a roof once, didn't shoot him four times in the head at point-blank range with a gun she'd been wearing next to her panties.

“Yeah, well. I've always been topsy-turvy,” says Roxy, swaying like she means it. Jane climbs to her feet and helps her up. There is still a red mist in the air, a smell of gunpowder, but in the mirror they are dapper as hell—the haze of gore a veil for smart dressers.

Outside the adults are gathered. No one mentions the gunshots, or the evidence of incident tracked like ink on their skin. Instead they press Jane to join them in the dining hall, where, apparently, appetizers are being laid out, and the baroness is waiting. Everyone is looking forward to Jane taking her place at the table, on the baroness' right hand.

“No,” says Jane, with Roxy clinging to her arm. She doesn't think about it. It just comes out, like spitting a loose tooth.

“But, Miss Crocker, the dinner—there are so many people you still have to meet—”

“It's all right,” murmurs Roxy.

And it could be, Jane's aware. The baroness is here, and Jane has questions she thinks she might even answer. There's an email address in Jane's contact list that bounces every missive sent to it, and a phone number that, if called, plays Hollaback Girls for hours before abruptly cutting out with a watery sound, but right now Betty is just a wall away. Plus, of course, who knows how many politicians, heads of state, and cooking show hosts, eager to curry favor with the civilized world's last bastion of unified corporate strength.

Roxy, at her elbow, wavers like a candleflame.

“No,” Jane repeats, the more sharply for having rediscovered doubt. “As you can see, my companion is feeling poorly. Sorry to dash, but I've got to escort her home toot-sweet, where she can rest and recover.”

Her audience is silent. Their eyes rest on the collar around Roxy's neck, and it isn't until Jane thunders, “ _Get out of my way,_ ” that they part to let her pass. Like the pricking of tiny needles, their wordless gawking follows her all the way down the steps, to where the driver sits with its hood down, waiting for direction.

 

At home, Jane makes Roxy pop Pepto-Bismol and watches her for signs of imminent death. The last traces of whatever was in the punch are gone from her system, but Roxy had about three times as much as her, and is smaller besides.

Still, the quiet ride back to the house—and a little retching over the side of the car into the far ocean below—seem to have done some good. Sitting on the kitchen table, Roxy is calm and ordinary. She makes a face over the aftertaste of the pills. “You're kind of a mess,” she says to Jane, which is true. Quick recovery or no, it's probably just as well that they didn't go in to dinner, when Jane is wet around the ankles from someone else's brains. There'd been no chance in hell of her going to go back into that bathroom to clean up.

“If you're sure you feel better,” she says.

“Peachy.” Roxy looks at her nails.

Jane goes to take a shower. She has more blood on her than she realized, a chrysanthemum down the side of her face and neck, saturating her stiff collar. When she stands under the flow of hot water it pellets off her neck and fingers, her hands shaking as if to an arrhythmic pulse under the onslaught. Half-dried, it takes a little while to wash away completely, twists of it breaking from the contiguous stain in little scarlet threads. She doesn't feel naked so much as bruised.

Afterwards she puts on a long shirt and pajama pants. Roxy is still on the table where she left her, now with her feet up on the back of one of the chairs and her hands draped lightly down her shins. It seems precarious. Jane has been thinking about saying something all through the ride home, and now, although it sounds incredibly stupid in her head, she does. “This is the first time I've ever had someone to thank for saving my life.”

Roxy looks at her blankly. “Lotta firsts tonight.” 

Jane gets up on the table next to her, and Roxy scooches over to make room. She drops her legs and lets them dangle, too. Jane sneaks a glance at the back of the chair, but there are no obvious footprints. She'll wash it later. “Jane,” says Roxy tiredly, “do you need something?” Jane's windpipe works without producing a sound.

She's only known Roxy a little while, and for most of that in a state of forced idleness, too discomfited by the situation to do anything other than let it persist, but she somehow thought she had an intuitive sense of what Roxy wanted, and would do. Roxy the awkward redemption-seeker, the thoughtless teller of stories from _back when I was evil,_ doesn't seem present tonight. The slopes of Roxy's shoulders are clean and steep over the low ruffled cut of her gown. Light scatters silvery over the top of her small breasts.

“Thank you,” says Jane. She touches Roxy's wrist. After a moment, Roxy closes her eyes and leans over, kissing the corner of Jane's mouth, and so relieved as to be speechless Jane turns her head.

They keep on for a minute like that, connected at the mouth and the hand, and then Roxy reaches across cup Jane's jaw. Was she trained for this too? Roxy's eyes open in a stuttery reminder of color, pink welling under black lashes, and Jane says, “You know you have a choice, don't you?” all in a rush. She bites her lip. “I mean—”

“I know,” says Roxy. She doesn't say it like someone speaking to an audience, but rather like she wants to comfort someone who can't hear her, someone too sick or sad to listen. She runs her hand down the loose front of Jane's shirt and Jane kind of wishes she had bothered to put on a bra. She doesn't want to look down and see the slack shape of her breasts. She wants—to be blacked out, unseen, moving without a witness, and Roxy has compassion in her face.

“Okay,” says Jane. She takes her glasses off. They kiss again, Roxy's forearm finding its way around to bend across the small of Jane's back, her other hand gripping Jane's shoulder. There's a rigid gentleness to her movements that reminds Jane of the collar. Anything she does to injure Jane, she'll feel tenfold. Some things, Roxy has said, she can't do even if there's only a chance they'll cause damage, even if her intentions are good, because the collar deems it too risky. Nose full of the smell of Roxy's skin, eye blinking close to Roxy's sleek bronze cheek, Jane finds herself doubting the technology, but when the arm tightens too much around Jane's back Jane hears her gasp. Roxy is halfway in her lap by that point, taffeta skirts tickling her stomach. “What happens if I order you to hurt me?” asks Jane, in morbid curiosity, and Roxy gets the strangest look on her face.

“Don't,” she says.

Jane's shirt comes off. The kitchen is well-lit, spacious, yellow on the sides of her eyeballs, and outside the night is perfectly black. If her father were here she would be upstairs in her room, which is more cramped now that the guest bed has been dragged in front of the door. Which: at this rate of progress in the development of their relationship, it seems like maybe they could have saved themselves the effort. She would be sitting cross-legged at the gameboy, or at her desk, light lending a blue cast to her face and shoulder.

They end up spread out across the bare table, Jane on her back for the second time that evening and Roxy, leaning over her, circling not her throat but her boob. This wasn't premeditated, Jane wants to say, but she's less than convincing even to herself.

“I have to bake on here,” she says eventually, instead. “Let's—we should move.”

Roxy lifts her face from Jane's neck and stares at her muzzily. “Oh,” she says, confused, “sorry, sure.”

Somehow they stumble to the living room, still entangled; Roxy's hand cupping her exposed spine. Jane can't imagine scaling the stairs or, worse, deciding on a bed, but the couch is manageable, and sinking into it makes her feel something like excitement through the stormbanks of terror. It's dark here, the television on but silent and making their shadows flicker on the blue wall: was Roxy watching, while she was in the shower? But no, Roxy was in the same place she left her. Roxy hadn't moved. Roxy straddles her legs like a show rider and slides down her pyjama bottoms with as much delicacy as is possible when dealing with clothing covered in tiny dancing owls. Jane plants a dry kiss on Roxy's clavicle, pushing herself off the cushions on her elbows, and Roxy says, “I like your underwear.”

It's almost farcical. It is, in fact, farcical, incredulity bubbling under Jane's ribs. On the other hand, Jane thinks, ruthlessly, Roxy asked what I needed, and Roxy puts two fingers to her hipbone and gazes at her stomach like a woman mapping the deep. What about her has made it possible for Jane to do this? Why, in front of a sixteen-year-old penitent and criminal, is she able to be naked when she has never even thought about this, standing before somebody unclothed?

“You _can't_ hurt me,” she says aloud, her chin close to Roxy's shoulder. Her breath disturbs the fall of Roxy's curls, blowing them back from her chokelet. Roxy licks her ear and says, “Nope,” her palm flat on Jane's sternum and a little wet from Jane's tongue. “Is that important?” Jane doesn't know how to answer. It occurs to her that she trusts Crockercorp technology more than people, that she trusts Roxy because of company endorsement, that when Roxy saved her life she felt abandoned rather than salvaged, because she had come so close to death after a period of long respite. There's a hole in the plaster of the wall above them where a knife buried itself three years ago, and had to be wrenched out by a drone, its blunt-ended other arm braced against the desk and leaving a ring like a coffee mug might, only described in crushed wood rather than water damage. “Yes,” says Jane, licking her lips, and kisses the taut side of Roxy's neck.

They rock against each other with Roxy's hand down the front of her underwear, warm as her own. She gets the stockings off, somehow, pausing with one hand against the empty holster: “Left it in the kitchen,” Roxy says, although Jane doesn't remember seeing it on the counter. “In the dishwasher,” continues Roxy, blithely, and at Jane's horrified expression adds, “— _j/k_!” as if this were obvious. Her breath smells like medicinal powder more than bile, almost sweet.

When they get down to it it's Roxy with her mouth between Jane's legs, her hands placed carefully on the inside of each of Jane's tawny thighs. Jane braces her feet on Roxy's shoulderblades and does her best not to grind down on the sugared diamond of Roxy's lips, with her fingers twisted in Roxy's hair, each knuckle wrapped in white. At some point Roxy slid off the couch to kneel on the ground in front of her, a practiced descent, and Jane eases forward to the couch's edge with a catch in her throat. She can see Roxy's nose, pressed absurdly to the tender base of her stomach; the heel of Roxy's hand shoves up flat against her bum. Thumb and forefinger form a hard V under her slit, and when Roxy's tongue hooks on the nub of her clit she bucks, bare soles slamming the muscles of Roxy's lower back with force enough to bruise. She feels her grin. “Umm,” says Jane, but Roxy keeps sucking, with increased confidence. “Ummmmmm,” says Jane, less meaningfully, and Roxy fucks her, all fluid tongue, no trace in her of teeth.

There's another finger slipping in, V gone stealth W. Roxy crooks it hard against a stinging inner wall. So little, and a second climax comes skipping on the heels of the first, a drawn-out wave of feeling. It might just be the first's delayed completion—except, no, because as it approaches its crest Roxy twists and bites Jane's tendonous thigh after all, and Jane sees stars. She shuts her eyes; there are cracks in the dark.

“Fuck!” Roxy hisses.

By the time Jane blinks away the last etching of brightness, she's sitting back on her haunches and clutching at her throat. Jane's legs slip off her shoulders. Jane feels slow, stupid, wrung-out, but: “It didn't hurt,” she protests, and Roxy looks at her with deep incredulity.

“What?”

Jane glares. “The chewtoying, goshdarnit,” she says. “It felt—”

“It did hurt,” interrupts Roxy, impatient as if it were day, and they were doing anything else. Her breathing is slowing, now, no longer the sharp short exhales of an animal in pain. “You just didn't know it was an attack because I have mad skillz. Be _lieve_ me, it hurt.”

Jane says nothing. Roxy is crouched and upright, her half-shed dress casting stark shade across her thighs. “Then... thanks?” tries Jane, and she shakes her head. “It's no big,” she says.

But the shock has obviously watered her enjoyment, and she refuses Jane's puzzled offer of reciprocation. “Well,” says Jane at last, “can't say as I blame you,” rising to sit topless in her pulled-up pants with shivers running up and down her skin. She feels extraordinary; even destined. Roxy, after a second's pause, climbs onto the couch and rests her head on her shoulder. Jane puts an arm around her elbows. She shudders, and Jane hugs her to her side.

* * *

On the three-week anniversary of Roxy's arrival, they do laundry. Jane puts it off for longer than she should, waiting for her father with the instinctive inertia of an only child unaccustomed to ironing her own pants; but at the end of three weeks they run out of towels, which settles the matter.

Roxy turns out to be even less useful than Jane when confronted with the complicated settings on the state-of-the-art washing machine. “I was a lovable rogue, not a plumber,” she says, after a ginger examination of the clustered knobs. She is dressed only in one of Jane's shirts and a pair of socks from the emergency store, which also had ties, suspenders, and cans of shaving cream stacked in case of apocalypse, most of them now past their expiration date. Jane can see the pale inside of her knees, but chooses not to, staring instead at a button on the dryer labeled, enigmatically, 'HATS'.

“Plumbing is _not_ the problem,” says Jane. She suspects her father may have had the button custom ordered. When she pokes it it doesn't depress.

“No,” Roxy agrees. “This seems more like a metaphysical thing. Conundrum. _Phenomena._ ”

They end up handwashing everything in the bathtub, except for the delicates, which they run cold water over and then leave plastered across the bottom of the sink. “Tell me what's wrong with this picture?” jokes Jane, on her knees and elbow-deep in soapy underwear, and Roxy says seriously, “Nothing,” which sort of cuts the conversation short.

Afterwards they hang out the wet stuff to air. May has turned the flowering maple tree to a tumorous system of red blooms, and the sun shines steadily out of the flayed blue sky; they string lines from branch to window and telephone pole to branch. The laundry blows white as flour in the breeze. “Pretty,” says Roxy. Jane is looking past it. She's aware that her father's estimates are always optimistic, that even her accounting for his optimism is usually optimistic, and like as not he won't be home until Tuesday or Wednesday, but she can't help watching for signs of his ship on the horizon: a red fleck in the purity of space.

It's not that she wants him to come back this minute. She misses him, but she doesn't know how she'll explain some of the changes that have taken place in his absence, and he might not approve of the way her socks dangle side by side with her shirts. He might not approve of Roxy, running laps around the house in a pair of his boxers because a bodyguard has to stay at the peak of fitness mountain, Jane, don't you know. Jane can see the perspiration on her arms when she passes by the front of the house; Jane, from her seat on the doorstep, watches Roxy get tireder and tireder in fragments of time.

She has seen a lot of Roxy's body in the past week, one way or another, but there's something different about watching Roxy push herself in this methodical way, her calves carving out afterimages on the insides of Jane's eyelids. It makes Jane conscious both of the fact that Roxy is in really good shape and that Roxy herself doesn't seem used to being so strong, that her own speed catches her by surprise.

On her twentieth circuit, Jane sticks out a leg as she passes. Roxy goes flying.

“You were never a soldier,” says Jane, as Roxy picks herself up out of the grass and the dirt.

Roxy spits out a mouthful of mulch. “Uh, what?” she says. There's mud all over the front of her shirt, in clumps that brush easily off its folds, and although Jane's prankster's gambit and sleuthy mojo both just shot up like five points she feels more than a little bad. “Sorry,” she says. “I don't know why I did that.” She helps Roxy wipe herself mostly clean.

“It's fine,” says Roxy, staring at her. “But even mega hardcore warrior babes can trip when they're on home ground.”

Which is flattering and an obvious misdirection. That night Roxy admits it, in tones that suggest she genuinely believes that Jane was for a minute fooled. “I was a hacker, not a slasher,” she says, over wine they rescued from her father's safe, Roxy scoping out the combination lock with a professional eye until Jane, impatient, pushed her out of the way and entered in the numbers she'd had memorized since middle school. Jane uncorked the wine barehanded, and now they're nursing it melodramatically, pretending to know what treatment good liquor needs: besides a tolerant throat. “Sort of a battle programmer? Leading impromptu militia of untrained spambots against uniformed adversity, 'n' stuff.”

“''n' stuff'?” says Jane, and has to make so many concentric air quotes that she ends up doing jazz hands.

Roxy's face is a cipher. “I don't really remember,” she says, finally. She refills her glass.

“I know I'm no doohickey whiz,” says Jane, steepling her fingertips in her lap. “But if you're such a crack techno-gal—haven't you ever thought about trying to hack the collar?” She doesn't say, I'd help. She's not sure that she would, ashamed as she is to think it. In another month, maybe, or two—but there's something to be said for insurance.

“No,” says Roxy. “I don't want to go back. Anyway,” she says, “I don't do that stuff anymore. Don't stress yourself, Crocker. They burnt the hotshot outta me.”

This is a declaration which, between the sniffing and the twirling of glasses, Jane is not yet drunk enough to answer. Instead she asks, “Where did you learn to fight, then? Were you trained at the Corp?”

“My mother,” says Roxy, gesturing with a half-empty cup. In the low lights of the kitchen the wine is dark and jeweled, a lambent burgundy. It casts watery shade on Roxy's cheek. “She was kind of gung ho. Kind of wacko. She was actually,” the wine's legs rising inexorably towards the wineglass' rim, “one of the founders, you could say, of the resistance movement. Ex-treme.”

She helps herself to the remnant drink and beneath the equator of its collar her throat bobs like the head of a bird.

“You never talk about your parents,” says Jane.

“Yeah?” says Roxy. She wipes her mouth. “I guess not. I guess it never seems too, what do you call it, _apropos._ Them being executed criminals and shitty entertainers besides.” Catching Jane's look: “Oh, yeah, they had jobs. My mom plagiarized Harry Potter for kicks and I _think_ my dad made movies, or maybe they were flipbooks? Comics? Somebody was always falling down shit, I remember that.”

If Jane were forced to name the biggest problem, currently, with the thing her and Roxy have been and are ongoingly doing, the what-do-you-call-it and taking tumbles in the dark, it's that they've gotten it all the wrong way round, and never had a chance to do it right. It would have been different if they'd fallen in love first, or even become real friends, but instead Roxy arrived ready-made as an extension of Jane's life and a function of her survival, and she completes Jane like a hole in the head. A roll in the hay per day they've managed handily, but Jane doesn't know whether she's allowed to touch Roxy when she's like this, with all her callous grief worn open on her face. The morning after they killed Cordelia Roxy woke her up to say, “Wait, were you a _virgin_?” Jane wasn't sure what to say. “Once Betty asked if I was interested in human reproduction and offered to take me to a gigolo in Santa Fe, and five days after I said no Santa Fe sank”? Or, “Gee, I'm sorry, what gave me away?” There is a private gravity that draws them in below the level of words—at least, Jane assumes there is, because if the completion of enterprising sexual hijinks were based on clear communication they would touch one another like nuns. In the time between pseudo-planetary collisions, they have this.

“What were the titles of your mother's novels?” she asks. Roxy flinches a bit; the movement visible in the ripples that spread across her drink. Jane steadies her elbow with an open palm. The look Roxy shoots her bears a family resemblance to grateful.

“It was a series,” she says. “The Complacency of the Learned.”

Jane listens. There is contempt in Roxy's voice, no doubt about it, and under that a hot thread of remorse. “Still in print?” she says lightly. She has never asked her father about her own mother, or wondered. She does not wonder now.

“Lol,” says her bodyguard.

The bottle runs out around eight, when the night outside the window is pupil-black, the kitchen reflected fourfold on the panes. “I can't believe you guys don't have a corkscrew,” says Roxy, regarding its sequel in futile covetousness. Jane wrenches the plug out with her teeth. “We probably do,” she says, muffled around clenched incisors. “Somewhere.” Roxy whistles her appreciation, low and wet. It's sad to say, but Jane feels something in her tighten with pleasure at having impressed. The back of her jaw aches dully.

They pass it back and forth between them without bothering to divvy it out again into the tulip-shaped wineglasses. There's fun to be had in pouring and swishing, the flared stream of the wine from bottlemouth to cup, but neither of them is fully equipped for playacting, and their impersonations of dead connoisseurs get tired fast. She can only describe a vintage as full-bodied—with a backbone of strawberries—so many times before she begins to miss bacon, in terms of consumable props. Roxy's mouth leaves warm traces of lipstick on the glass, black daubing green like rot, and Jane sucks off the bitterness with the sweet. This close, Roxy's hair is a shock of white, diffusing like smoke into the lamplight.

She has a thought about the lipstick, but it eludes her. She tracks the paint's erosion off Roxy's pale lips: or not so pale, actually, but Jane can see the inside of her mouth, its sphere slowly expanding every time Roxy knocks back a swallow, and that is pink as a dog's underbelly. Roxy notices the increasing weight of her stare, and tries to wink in slow motion, succeeding instead at looking as though she's been punched. She starts to speak and Jane interrupts her. “Why did they let you bring make-up with you, anyway?”

Roxy transitions smoothly from proposition to exposition. “Believe it or not,” she says, “it's part of my official bodyguard kit.”

“No flipping way,” says Jane. She feels warm, buoyed up by Roxy's absurdity. She grabs Roxy's chin as if she'll find evidence of deceit written in the shadow of Roxy's lip. Roxy accepts the manhandling good-naturedly, craning her neck to let Jane see.

“Way,” she says. “You know those movies where the femme fatale kisses the hero and he wakes up in a hospital because it turns out her lipstick was poison?”

“Um,” says Jane. She glances at the bottle she's been licking lipstick off of for the past… half-hour?

Roxy looks embarrassed. “Not _actually_ ,” she hastens to assure Jane. “They, uh, they didn't trust me with the real prototype. No, I got the placebo version.”

“Placebo poisonous lipstick.” She must have misheard.

“Yeah!” says Roxy. “Like, if I run up against a serious, genre-savvy threat who I can't just punch up—then I get my wily smooch on, and they're paralyzed by fear and indecision, 'cuz they know that nine mysterious chicks out of ten always come equipped with evil lipstick to superspy tête-à-têtes.”

“I need,” says Jane deliberately, “to be less sober,” and letting go of Roxy's chin she takes a showy swig.

In this she is successful. Ten o' clock finds her fumbling over card tricks out of Colonel Sassacre's, Roxy watching with more goodwill than comprehension. Normally Jane can rig a deck like a pirate rigs a, well, deck, but the alcohol turns her fingers rubbery and slow. She cuts her thumbs on the bottom edge of a stray ace, and her knuckles periodically send spades spraying halfway across the table: a profusion of white. The first time, Roxy claps. “Nice trick,” she says. Jane sweeps up the stray cards like leaves and tries not to be too obviously ashamed. She tells Roxy to pick a card, any card, and Roxy plucks jokers.

At eleven they abandon the mess and head outside to the dewy yard. Far above their heads hover the pale shapes of their shucked clothes on the line, isolated by darkness to the semblance of flight. Holes cut out of the sky according to old pants-patterns, with the stuffing of the world leaking through? The other thing about Roxy's lipstick, by now no more than a ghost of color on the cracked terrain of her mouth, is that it is—was—a mauve so deep as to veer into jet; which in a year when the reigning fashion is to accent with candy red makes Jane picture Roxy's blood as blackened, ink-stewed, her arteries crammed with a starless void.

They make out a little under the tree: tentatively, next to the tire swing, with their hands laced together around the chain. Roxy tastes like wine and a little bit like dirt. It reminds Jane that she hasn't taken a shower since she did her aborted run around the house. “You're unsanitary,” she tells her, mumbling into the side of her mouth. Roxy nods like she's speaking gospel truths and tries to dip her, almost knocking her off the feet in the process. As a kid her father used to push her on the swing, in intervals defined by the sound of the foghorn, which grew louder and louder over the years as the circle of lighthouses contracted. Sometimes she fell. She doesn't think her tailbone could take a repeat performance tonight.

“Jane, bane, wane,” Roxy murmurs, or else she's just saying her name and Jane is having trouble making it out. The chain bumps lightly against her goosebumped wrist. Roxy holds onto her shoulders with slippery hands; her fingerprints engrave themselves on Jane's cold collarbones. Clutching at each other like children too impatient to wait for their turn on the rope—well, and why not? Roxy kisses up to the slant corner of Jane's open eye, her breath forming almost physically in Jane's recoiling sight. She slips one hand into the curl of Jane's waistband.

But the liquor makes them numb and the chill makes them stiff, so that before long they have extracted themselves to huddle among the roots. Too close to the ground to fear collapse. “Why is it,” says Jane, “if you could fight like you can, as young as you are, why didn't those hoity-toity terrorists make use of you?”

Roxy's eyelids drop like shutters. “They needed fork fodder a lot less than they needed... somebody to move numbers around,” she says. “We sort of—they weren't that big on actually fighting anyone. There are few enough of us left as it is.”

Humans, she means.

“That didn't stop them from trying to kill me,” Jane says, with the total calm of the very soused. Roxy's face is barely more than a gray oval in this gloom, its topography suggested more by smudgy hollows than by any point of light, but Jane sees a muscle tense in her cheek.

“Sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” says Jane, although it might be. She doesn't know. It's possible Roxy doesn't know, either, that they took that right along with her coding superpowers, and left her with only unlikely parents and anecdotes from the underground. “And they gave me you, inadvertently speaking, so perhaps it cancels out, eh?”

Roxy is silent. “I'm not such a great bodyguard,” she says, eventually.

“Yes, but,” says Jane, “we don't make such a bad team, do we? With the distracting and the shooting and all. Anyway, I forgive you. All right? If anyone's to—if anyone's bummed it up, it's my great-grandmother, for expecting you to take care of me alone. It's not right.” And she puts her fingers roughly to the side of Roxy's head, warm through her hair, remembering the scars that must ridge the brain beneath.

“Could be she sent me with something else in mind,” says Roxy. It's an odd echo of Jane's earlier thoughts, and she starts a little, guiltily, but Roxy says it like a joke and looks at her with all the rawness of intent. It's like roleplay, Jane supposes, a scenario—the heiress and her obedient guard—but unlike roleplay it has the advantage of being real and unavoidable. Sexy!

“It's not right,” she says again, and then: daring to voice a thought she'd never even allowed to form, she tells her friend, “When I'm in charge, it will be different.” She cups the shape of Roxy's skull, behind her ear. Roxy's eyes land on her, huge and glossy from fright, and Jane says, “I'll make it so.” There is a quality to her own speech she doesn't recognize; tender, and abyssal, it trembles like the throbbing of the dark through skinny veins.

 

She wakes up to the shared ancestor of all hangovers. Roxy is glued to her by the mouth and the palms, her body otherwise curving away from Jane's in bare parenthesis, and although she's asleep there is already a wrinkle of pain in her clear brow. Jane is unsympathetic. Jane is possibly going to be incapable of feeling sympathy ever again, thanks to the nesting reptile in her suffering cranium. She tries to burrow back into unconsciousness, but the dilute white sunlight is like a grapefruit spoon on the underside of her eyes. At last she launches herself upright by sheer impatience, and staggers over to the closet to dress.

Downstairs, she realizes she is acting as if she thinks her father is home, which makes her angrier. She goes to the kitchen and starts laying out the ingredients for a recovery cake, dropping bags of sugar and rock salt onto the counter with furious force, and when Roxy makes a bleary appearance in the doorway Jane snaps, “What does he need to go on a business trip for, anyway? He's got a sinecure!” Roxy, with animal wisdom, beats a hasty retreat. Jane hears her dash outside to throw up. Her retching is audible through the open front door. The kitchen window faces the backyard, so Jane doesn't actually know where Roxy is being sick, but she assumes she's taken it to the very edge of the land, and that her vomit will be carried away by the sea. If Jane could throw her head after it she would. Instead she mixes, viciously.

Roxy doesn't come back inside. There's a clunk when wind slams the door shut, and Jane winces at the sound. It's shaping up to be a cold gray day: fog rolling in across the water to lend flesh to the sky. Baking, under these circumstances, is a blind comfort. The cake is going to be a little weird, because she's almost to the end of this month's supplies, but Jane eventually ascertains that she has almost all the ingredients for soufflé—no, all of them, she can make the base with the parmesan left over from last night's pasta. She is in the mood for cheese, insofar as she is in the mood for anything that isn't a hasty death.

Outside the sun rises unseen behind its veil. Her arms are eggy when noon hits, the little shadows thrown by the distant sky erased entirely, and she's putting the cakes in the oven when a knock comes on the back door.

If it's an assassin, the approach is novel. Jane looks out the window: standing with one hand in his pocket is a man in a leather jacket who presently sports sunglasses without regard for the state of the weather. His brown hair forms little tufts and peaks atop his scalp, making her think _forest_ for an unreasonable and vivid second. His nose, hawklike, overhangs the crook of his lip. It's hard to tell, but she doubts there's room for concealed weapons in the line of his jeans, and although he is cool as a uber-douchey cucumber he's also _old_. Older than her dad, and older than Cordelia, wrinkly around the eyes and sprigged with grey at the temples. His skin is paper-pale and odds of him doing murder seem slimmer than the cellphone at his ear. Who is he talking to, framed in plain sight by lacy curtains? She wipes her hands slowly on the dishrag, her mind ticking around.

Technically she ought to call for Roxy. But for two weeks now she's been in increasing contact with the outside world, via phone interview and, confoundingly, fanmail; some elementary school kids sent her their essays about how Betty Crocker products have improved their lives, and though she didn't make it past the first two, put off by the misspellings, she gets gooey just thinking about their little fingers on the keyboard. Odds are, the man's a civilian or at worst a journalist. And while it was one thing to bring a gussied-up escort to a roughly private dinner—Roxy is probably still wearing her old shirt. She's probably still visibly bruised around the eyes. Less use than Jane would be in a bust-up, in fact. Didn't they settle between them, anyway, that there was an ingrained silliness to the whole nature of her employment? She opens the door.

“Jane Crocker?” says the man, and flashes a police detective's badge. “I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you have a moment. —It's about Cordelia Downey.”

The first thing that springs to her lips is, _That was her last name_? She doesn't actually say it, but it's close.

“Certainly,” she manages, moving aside to let him in. He crosses the doorframe with a spring in his step.

Of course, now that she knows he's a real live gumshoe, every aspect of his appearance has to be re-evaluated and measured against the idols of her memory. But somehow the attitude of clinical worship eludes her. Her eyes keep flicking to his whorled ear, bent away slightly from his skull by the arm of the sunglasses, and the double-creased seam between it and his cheek. Clean-shaven, decrepit, clinging to youth. She can't bring herself to believe he's ever been on a TV show at all.

“Ms. Downey was last seen alive at the August Benevolence Dinner on April 21st,” he says, and then a number of other rapid things about _multiple witnesses_ and _did not return_. Jane listens to the flood in increasing consternation until, eventually, the word _murder_ bobs up on the tide. There she stops him.

“Wow,” she says, “I'm sorry, there's been a serious misunderstanding, I think. My fault, really, I was so bamboozled that night—” His gaze sharpens, and she breaks off. “Stop that,” she says, too irritable to be civil. “I'm telling you what happened, there's no need to latch onto random clues. Honestly. Don't they teach you anything in detective school?”

He gestures for her to continue. She'd meant to amuse, but whatever.

“It was self-defense,” she says.

“What was?” says the detective, and she tells him, as briskly as she can. She needs to convey that this is normal, expected, that the only unusual thing about what she describes is that her attacker took so long to die. Though she doesn't want him to think her insensitive, even if he is a pasty excuse for an investigator. She gets confused halfway through her description of Roxy coming out with the gun, and twice mentions that the punch was spiked. He doesn't prevent her from repeating himself; just licks a pencil and takes notes on a pad. Thank god Roxy isn't here for this, Jane thinks, and wonders how she can prevent her from re-entering the house before he's gone.

If he goes. “Ms. Crocker,” he says evenly, “you said that Downey's weapon of choice was a needle.” She braces herself for restrained ridicule, but what he follows up with is, “Did she break skin?”

Jane frowns. Without meaning to, her hand finds its way to the underside of her eye. The detective goes paler.

“Ma'am,” he says, “I'm going to have to ask you to come with me.”

“I don't think I'm under your jurisdiction,” says Jane.

He flips the badge and points it at the wall. The Crockercorp trident forms itself in faint red beams of light, pocked by its bed of plaster. Jane moves back a little from it, her palms held out in front of her as though to calm a minute predator. The detective says, “You may be interested to know that the convention of using needles on dangerous solo missions was first established by Roxy Lalonde's mother when she killed Chaplain Fieri.”

“What?” says Jane.

“It's a brilliant and insidious technique,” says the detective, confident now of her attention. “They've had the chemical compound isolated since the nineties at least—Skaianet, you know, was working with several terrorist organizations before its timely collapse, and of course they were responsible for a majority of nonCrocker innovations towards the end of the century.”

“Of course,” says Jane.

He doesn't notice her tone. “Delivered intravenously and combined with subliminal messages delivered by a rebel agent, it induces a state of delusion over the course of weeks, eventually resulting in a full conversion. The only mercy is that Lalonde didn't get the chance to finish her work. But you still need to have the residue of the drug flushed from your system, to prevent ill-effects—”

“What makes you think she didn't finish?” says Jane, and tries to laugh. It scrapes her palate.

The detective smiles. “Well,” he says, “since she ran off a week after the party...”

Jane stares at him.

“Oh, we weren't sure at first,” he says, “she must have done something with the cameras on her way out, we had a hell of a time gathering footage. But there's no way we could have missed getting a shot of her if she were still here.”

“Cameras,” says Jane.

This time he does pick up on something. The wrong something, but credit where credit's due, his learning curve is up. “For your own protection,” he says. “Your father consented to their installation. I'm surprised he didn't tell you—I suppose you must have been pretty young then.” He rakes her with one eye, kind and contemptuous. The motion of his pupil behind the darkened lens like a glimpse of a fish's back underwater. “How else would we make sure nothing happened to you?”

“I'm very afraid something has happened to me,” says Jane, and extends one hand out towards the mixing spoon that rests, forgotten, on the countertop. Despite apparent simplicity, the action seems nearly impossible to her, doable only if she doesn't think about it head-on. Her fingers inch. “You said she left, what, a week ago? And her dreaaad brainwashing still incomplete?”

“Well, yes,” says the detective, watching her hand. “Something must have happened to scare her off. If you search your memory, perhaps—”

The front door opens with a crack. They both look up. “Hey, Jane?” calls Roxy. “I'm bringing in the laundry, okay? It's only a little damp.”

What happens next is so fast that Jane will think there must be something she doesn't remember, or something she made up, complicating the flurry like lasers in a snowstorm. But in reality it's quite simple: he starts for the living room, and she hits him smack between the eyes with the spoon. He staggers backwards, fumbling for his pocket, and she follows him. She grabs his head by the flat small ears and slams it against the corner of the fine marble countertop, several times, as hard as she can with arms that have always been able to free corks from winebottles and doors from frames. He doesn't even struggle—his hands never touch her. She keeps banging the side of his head on the marble long after his legs crumple under him. When she finally lets him drop one half of his face is a mash of oozing crimson, and there's blood and hair stuck in a gluey patch on the clean stone. Also an eerie concavity to the slant of his skull. She can't tell if he's breathing. She turns, red-handed, the spoon at her feet, and sees Roxy frozen halfway across the floor from her, her arms full of clean linens.

There is a silence like the first ice of autumn.

“What the _fuck_ ,” says Roxy, finally. Sheets go everywhere as she scrambles past Jane towards the erstwhile detective. In frustration, Jane thinks, she shouldn't have done that; I can't pick them up, my hands aren't clean. But Roxy is probably not in the mood to discuss laundry. She's bent over the body, her hands crossed on his breastbone. She pumps and pumps. “Are you insane?” she says.

“Is he dead?” Jane replies.

Roxy doesn't answer. Jane waits, patiently, for about five seconds, and then comes over and pulls her off him. “It's not his heart that's the problem,” she says, as consolation. By contrast, Roxy's pulse thrums in her wrist like a netted bird.

She lurches in Jane's grip. “Where's your telephone?” she demands, “we can call 911—no, fuck me, no we can't, because _there aren't any hospitals—”_ and then she's laughing, and not moving, which Jane can handle.

“Why don't you show up on cameras?” she asks. Roxy stares at her blankly. “Never mind,” says Jane, letting go. She leans over and picks the body up.

* * *

Her father has rolls of chicken wire in the shed from his one and only attempt to keep his own poultry, a fancy he pursued to encourage her youthful agricultural bent and as a source of material for her science projects. As an experiment it lasted a month before they started to miss grass, and two months before the last of the chickens drowned, but the psychological effects were lasting; Jane still sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night expecting a haunting cluck. Now she directs Roxy in wrapping the wire around the detective's torso, holding him off the ground so that Roxy can ease a length of fencing under his back before folding it over his chest.

“Where do you _learn_ this stuff?” says Roxy, and Jane says, “Books. TV. Did you get his feet?”

They sacrifice an ancient space heater to the need for an anchor, tying it to his ankles once they've lugged him aboard the boat. In death his face is slack and younger than it looked while he was breathing, except for the places where it no longer resembles a face at all. Jane steers, this time, clasping the wheel like another person's hands. There is a trembling resistance from the motor. On the water, the world is a hood of mist, so that even if she weren't near-sighted the horizon would slop at her toes. She goes south, this time, and Roxy sits with the body, her hands between her knees.

There's an interview—one of the only ones ever released to the public—where the baroness talks to Tina Fey. Tina Fey is not one of the comedians Jane relishes: she lacks the weight of tradition, which in Jane's view is the soul of humor, the shock that's only possible because of inlaid expectations. Still, she's seen the interview more than once. At the end Tina asks about the charity Jane herself founded, and Betty gives a patronizing smile and says she quite approves, a noble enterprise. She says, A sitch like this, and I'm hella inspired by one a your human leaders' quotes; what was it, now? _Let them eat cake._

Jane stops twenty miles away from her house. It's not far enough, but nothing is. Roxy helps her get him over the side, and he drops with hardly a splash, grey water closing over him like frothy silk. His shadow beneath the water is a faint mottling, and lasts minutes. When she's as sure as she can be that he's as sunk as he can, she turns around for home.

They're both soaked through from drizzle by the time they make land, and they only linger as long as it takes to moor the boat before hurrying inside. It's a good thing Roxy got the clothes in, although they're still strewn across the kitchen floor, a white catastrophe. Roxy looks towards them as they pass the kitchen, but they go upstairs without stopping, and at the top Jane splits off to wash her hands.

There is blood under her fingernails, dried to thick rusty crescents. Jane forces out each little wedge of matter with a wire brush, and they cling to porcelain before whirling down the drain. Her own face in the mirror is sallow under the dark complexion, hollow like an airless balloon around the eyes. Damp curls cling to the corners of her forehead. She cleans blood off her glasses, too, and a delicate spray of droplets from the rain, and she puts them on the side of the sink.

In her room, Roxy stands backlit by the window. Her left side is to Jane, and her curls carve a contained greyness out of the pigeon-pale sky. Jane walks to her, and when Roxy turns slips behind her back, putting her arms together around Roxy's waist. Roxy tips her head back to rest in the scoop of Jane's shoulder and neck. Her hair is wet and spiky like a basilisk's scales, and Jane tugs down her father's boxers where they hang low on Roxy's articulate hips. She wishes she had thought to ask the detective where he is. She wishes she had kept his cellphone, instead of burying it with him in a watery grave; she could have imitated his voice to someone on the other end of the line, asked for up-to-date information about the location of one Mr. Crocker, please. She no longer really believes that he'll return if she doesn't retrieve him.

“Boonbuck for your thoughts,” says Roxy, and Jane presses down hard on her crotch with three fingers. The flat of the hand, crushing skin. Roxy rises up on her toes, trying to provide an opening, and Jane's lock around her stomach hitches up and up, tightening under the arch of her ribs. Her shirt bunching like a thin second hide.

It's so cold. The heater's on, the house bristles with furry bursts of warmth, and yet Roxy under her fingers slides like ice. She puts her mouth on Roxy's hair, drawing it up and away from her hairline, and Roxy's eyes jump up to laugh at her from beneath the bone structure of her brow. Or she's just straining to see—her mouth is fixed and still, so there's really nothing to say that she's mirthful. Jane thumbs the ridged sweep of Roxy's flank and Roxy wriggles, head to toe, like a fish on a line.

The strange thing is, this has proved to be exactly the sort of thing that gets her off, post factum. Roxy needy, Roxy flirting, Roxy a cool sink for heat. But Jane, in this moment, feels nothing. She wicks her fingers between Roxy's lips, and then into Roxy, a little clumsy from the near-sexlessness of her position but able, for all that. Her back and spine are stone. Roxy, slouching against her, hair splaying on the edge of her numb cheek, moves herself up and down on Jane's tense knuckles, her own hand dropping to spread the crease of her thigh.

“I'll tell you why I did it,” Jane says in her ear, out of nowhere. It's inane, but Roxy only shakes her head. “Don't,” she says urgently, voice cracking like bone. “Oh, _Jane_.”

She struggles, and the wet rush of her come is hot and slow. It drapes Jane's hand. Jane is cold to the core, and her dumb infant heart hammers her sternum as though determined to bring her down from within. She knows every corner of Roxy's limbs, an expert in nothing but this one person, and she catches her when she crumples: one hand under each arm.

“Jesus, Crocker,” says Roxy, pulling herself up and bumping her head on Jane's chin. Jane doesn't object. She doesn't move, either, when Roxy turns to kiss her dreadfully, her breath sour from old nausea—why are they always kissing after one or the other of them has puked, as though chasing the last residue of poison?—when Roxy holds her face with both hands and deploys fierce tongue. There is an unbearable freshness to the pressure of Roxy's mouth, wet and shocking, like biting into an apple pear. She lets her touch two fingers to the corner of her lips, pressing down hard against the taut dry skin, and Roxy says, “Let's do this puh-puh-puh- _prop_ erly, huh?” Leads her, by one hand, to the bed.

 

This time when she wakes up she is alone.

Her migraine today is soberly gotten, and it pounds with the shiftings of the flesh. They fell asleep near eight the night before, exhausted and not speaking; she feels like she's been asleep for years, but the shadows have recent memories of sunrise, and stretch, mountainous, from every raised crevice of her sheets. She troubles cotton and a landscape shudders.

Downstairs someone has laid out the laundry and folded it inexpertly. Roxy. There's no one else. Also, her father would never suffer creases like those to live. She picks through the flaccid-armed shirts and unstraightened underwear, and walks into the yard still in the process of pulling a sweater on. The sky is streaked with opalescence, deepening to salmon at its base, and the flowering maple tree breaks it up like a vein. She can't see Roxy anywhere, until her gaze falls from the marbled firmament to the big, dark silhouette of the house, and the small, darker silhouette of the girl on the balcony.

 _Oh, no_ is her first thought, clear and undeniable as disease. She tugs on the hem of her sweater, ridiculously. Thinks: there's only one way up to the roof.

But Roxy doesn't hear her climb the stairs or come out onto the deck, tip-toeing on sneakers. Roxy, bent to the telescope, is possibly insensate. She has on the outfit she arrived in, down to the fuzz-upholstered boots. Jane experiences a moment of intense regret that she put those things in with the rest of the washing, or allowed them to be put: in the Hot Topic rags of her advent Roxy is all slinky outlaw once again, past trust or hope of control. Not that she ever didn't look like a delinquent, really, or that Jane forgot how she'd arrived, but she supposes she wanted Roxy to forget, and part of her believes that if she'd hidden the couture well enough she would have. As in the case of a fisherman betrothed to a seal, she should have kept Roxy's skin at the bottom of the chest, weighed down by driftwood and treasure. Roxy could be tamed. It's just hard to see how, with her uncovered arms and knees slim and matte brown in the long sunlight, the carriage of her neck erect. Against her curving nape the choker burns.

She has her bag from day one, too.

“Don't do this,” Jane says. She means it to come out quiet and serious, but a manic edge creeps in. Roxy whirls, and the bag slides off her shoulder with a thump. “Shit!” she says. Then, “ _Balls._ ” She starts to back away. "You were supposed to be asleep! Didn't the lipstick work?"

“Stop,” says Jane, as commandingly as she knows how. And in case the collar needs more: “I order you to stop.”

Roxy doesn't stop. She is almost up against the railing and Jane shuts her eyes, fists her hands at her side, and tries to will the fiddly Corp microcircuitry into answering her need from ten feet away. Hear my cry. When she opens them again Roxy is observing her with fathomless pity.

“So you did hack it,” Jane says.

“Yeah,” says Roxy. "A week ago. The cameras too."

“I should have known.”

“Maybe,” says Roxy. “But I wasn't lying about what they tried to do to me. I'm just good at—” a pause, as she searches for words.

“Evading detection?” says Jane, and Roxy looks at her, surprised.

“Something like that,” she says.

“You know, I don't believe you brainwashed me,” says Jane, approaching. Roxy, with nowhere left to retreat, braces herself on the balustrade as though expecting to be pushed. Jane stops. “But I would think that, wouldn't I? No, don't interrupt. When you took me out sailing and ran up a flag—that was a signal, wasn't it?”

Roxy's reaction would be funny under better circumstances. As it is Jane takes no pleasure from the convulsive tightening of her knuckles, the way muscles stand out in her suede-wrapped calves. The young Jane had a rat, the one and only pet she ever wrangled besides the snow-white cat who used to wander the neighborhood and who could probably walk on water. The rat died of fear one day while she was out on the pogo stick, absorbing dusty sunlight; she came back to find it prone, stiff, and goggling, its small ears shelling up from its neck like partially-opened petals. This of all the things that she has ever lost is what her mind circles around, here where the freckles are stark on Roxy's cheek.

“So if you weren't sent to convert me with chemicals,” she says, “what was your assignment?”

Roxy stares at her. Then makes a finger-gun gesture, aiming with exactness at Jane's heart.

The disappointment almost crushes the air from her lungs. “You're kidding me,” she says.

Roxy gives an apologetic shrug.

Jane kicks the bag viciously aside, and comes closer. “So all this,” she says, raking up and down Roxy with a glance, “was just you guys' last-ditch kill scheme? Ran out of all your other hitmen, did you, and switched to teenage geeks?”

“No,” says Roxy. “I mean, yeah, it was, originally. But it didn't take long for me to realize that there was something wrong.”

“I should hope so—”

“It was too easy,” says Roxy flatly. “We were banking on the drones' numbers being down, because we've pushed her to spread 'em thin this year, but all of them gone? Leaving you with just me and the surveillance cameras? Hauling your dad off for quotity unquote business? And then I thought, okay, what if Betty _wanted_ her killed?”

Jane goes stock-still.

“You gotta understand,” Roxy continues, “we thought you were a big shaker and mover. A heavyweight in the internal political scene of the whatever. And she worked hard to keep us thinking that, you should see your dossier—but I know you, Jane, I've seen how you live.”

“Not in the Louvre?” says Jane.

“Alone,” says Roxy. “And she likes you that way.”

There is a wind rising in the west, and it sings through the yard tree like the ghost of starving birds. Fingertips of cold pepper Jane's scalp. “Don't lie to me, Roxy,” she says.

“You think your dad is coming home?” says Roxy, with a kind of wild rage, as inaccessible to her as if locked behind a glass pane. “You think those detectives who sit and watch you shower every day are gonna burst in to lock me up again, now that I've gone and confessed? She trotted you out just long enough to get your poignant titchy on display and now I'm supposed to take you out on camera and do a fucking _number_ on the revolution's PR—”

“ _Don't lie to me_ ,” says Jane, and swings. Roxy ducks the punch and tries to roll under her arm, but Jane catches the back of her shirt and hauls her up. Roxy slaps her and Jane slams her face against bars, flips her around and grabs loose material in her fist and bends her back over the railing.

“I'm not—lying—”

Jane tries to stop her mouth, but Roxy grabs her upper arms, sending them both reeling away from the edge. They roll across the tile like dogs in helpless heat. Roxy's hair is on her tongue, tasting distinctly of Jane's shampoo. Laundry, shower; you'd think she was a hotel guest, not a conman and a killer. Well, and didn't Jane let her sleep in her own room, eat her cakes, borrow her underwear? Didn't she let Roxy fuck her? She wrenches Roxy's elbow off her throat and rises, gasping, her ribcage aflame. Roxy drags her down again, straddles her, punches her in the sternum and the stomach: tight controlled jabs that reduce her arms to the semblance of engines. Pain on an assembly line. There is a flashing trickle of blood on Roxy's upper lip, like a trail of spilt oil, which Jane doesn't remember putting there; and caught in a wealth of sharpening light they ogle each other as strangers would at the site of an accident.

Roxy snaps out of it first. Without a word she scrambles off Jane, rubbing her palms together in slow-mo parody of applause. “I'm not going to kill you,” she says. The trickle crests on the peak of her lip and she licks it away. “I'm going to leave, and you can stay here and live and maybe one day you'll even figure out how to do something, who the frick knows.”

She seems to be trying to convince herself. She looks at Jane and then away, west, to the burnished galleries of cloud that ring the earth. Jane curls onto her side, hardly hurting but hovering, she knows, just above the sting. At this distance Roxy's soles are rubber-thorned, the tread immense. Her footprints would span nations. “Why did you take out Cordelia?” says Jane. “Your mother—”

That makes the frank lawless mouth quirk. “I told you,” Roxy says, “even our great campaign gets infighting. We rejected the tenets of Miz and Mister Lalonde helluva long ago—the people who still copycat 'em, they're the ones we're trying to weed for. Once I determined that I probably shouldn't do anything to you... well, you were still good for luring the bad seeds out.”

“Until Crockercorp sent followup,” says Jane.

“Until you _killed the shit_ out of Crockercorp's followup,” Roxy corrects her. "Yes."

Jane starts to push herself up onto her elbow, but a revolver appears in Roxy's hand, retrieved from who-knows-where; what unsafe pocket. “Stay down,” says Roxy.

“Going to bump me off after all?”

“Nope,” says Roxy, “but I don't think anyone will blame me if I kneecap you. You are fucking terrifying, you know that?” Again she scans the lightening sky.

Jane feels very old and very tired, like an animal that only ever had a few years to live. “No,” she says, “not really,” but Roxy isn't listening to her. “It's not going to work,” she says, louder, resting her cheek on the cold roof. The headache is a presence in her, like the elegant claw of her great-grandmother, wrapped around her brainstem and holding tight to nerves. The question Jane has is, was she there, that night at the banquet? Was she really presiding over the long table, taller than every human there—did they make her a specially sized throne, or was all the furniture scaled up to match her, and the people sitting with their chins just over the tabletop? If Jane had come in, after all, towed her drugged bodyguard along with, would Betty have greeted her by name: deployed the bright leading edge of her sickle-sharp grin?

Roxy glances at her. “Look, I know you don't believe me,” she says. “You probs can't, I've never seen someone with so many stopguards in their head. Must've been the college prep. Just—keep still, okay?” She waves the gun vaguely at Jane's middle.

“I don't believe you,” says Jane calmly. “But if what you say is true, it won't work. They're still going to blame you.” She tries to breathe evenly, in time with the sea. “I'm still going to die.”

Roxy frowns. “The footage is all there,” she says. “It's in the archives. I mean, yeah, you're going to die sooner or later, that's what happens when sea bitch has it out for you, but you said it yourself, they don't even think I've been here since—”

“They don't think diddly,” says Jane. “And when they find out Mr. Detective is missing, they'll say you must have suborned me, and take me away to be cured. And they'll fix me up, all right, and let it out that I died of neurotoxins, or psychoactive drugs, or I self-destructed because you programmed me too well.” The horror on Roxy's face is gratifying. She presses on. “Why did you think I killed him? I was trying to protect us both—I couldn't think of anything else to do.”

They have been up here, now, for the better part of an hour. She can't see her watch, with one hand trapped under her side, but the sky has changed too much for less, although it is still empty. It's funny: she went to all that trouble to hide the body, to make sure no part of it would ever float to the surface, but even then she must have known that the cameras had caught that, too, that she would be recorded in the instant of her terror. She'd done it, maybe, for the fun of it. The fantasy of escape.

Roxy is silent: her face like a fading scar. "You're right,” she says. And she looks at Jane, and she drops the gun to rest against her thigh. “I mean, it makes sense. She'd do that. And they have the evidence to shut up any critical thinkers.”

Jane sits up, tentatively. Without appearing to think about it, Roxy offers her a hand. Jane has a brief image of herself seizing it and tossing Roxy onto her back, of getting the gun and throwing it into the whitecaps below. When she blinks it dissolves. She takes the hand, four fingers to her palm, and rises none-too-steadily to her feet.

Roxy doesn't let go, then, but tightens her grip, her thumb sliding up to bridge Jane's wrist. The useless collar gleams.

“Come with me,” she says. Her curls are heavy, dense, falling in her eyes, but through black lashes her gaze sucks water like secret fruit. Jane's throat is dry. “You don't know what to think, right? Don't know who to trust? Come with me. We totes need new recruits. What's the worst that can happen? You might die, sure, but you might die anyway. _Best_ case, you spend five years getting rehabilitated for being a crazy fucker.” Impulsively, she leans forward and kisses Jane's cheek, low and hard, almost at the corner of her jaw. Her breath a puff of heat on Jane's bare lobe. Her free hand cups Jane's neck, the bone behind Jane's ear. She smells like summer. She was going to kill Jane, and she would not even have known how to sink the body when she was done. The fact is, nothing Jane thought she'd learned in her was true, and yet—

Jane looks over her shoulder.

“What did you say your friends are coming for you in?” she says.

“I didn't,” murmurs Roxy. “But they didn't tell me, either. We have to be careful about tappable messages.” Beat. “They said I'd know it when I saw it.”

“Yes,” says Jane, “I think you would,” and like a flock of bygone birds the drones mount the horizon.

As yet they are tiny but unmistakeable: a reddish cloud, superimposed on the sun. Roxy pivots, slowly, her hand still open on Jane's warm throat. “Wowee,” she says, voice faint.

“Still think you're going to get away?” says Jane, detached as a retina in a blind man's eye. But Roxy is lopsidedly smiling, her chin held level. “I'm sure,” she says. “Dirk always talked about rewiring them. Didn't think he could do it without me, the showoff. Yoo-hoo, cockroaches! ” She drops her hand and goes to the railing, her wrists like glaciers. They shape the world. Jane leaves the telescope and joins her at the edge. “How can you be so certain?” she asks, heart insoluble in the back of her mouth.

“I know what I want,” says Roxy. “That's all there is anymore.” She doesn't try to kiss Jane again. From this angle the smile curves into her like a hook.

Jane thinks, she could be wrong. About all of it, not just the provenance of the fleet; it could be that Betty isn't out for her blood, but only stretched, unable to shelter her through to adulthood and beyond. That she lapsed and then recovered from that lapse, and sent her troops. _I know what I want._ What had she said? When I'm in charge, it will be different. But what would she change? Her father to be here, perhaps. Her father to be somewhere. Around her dawn is collapsing into day, the gangly shadows retracting like a cat's translucent claws, and waves lap at the sidewalk with brilliant foam tongues. It is a moment which if she could she would preserve forever, but which, like any precipice, will eventually break off into the surf.

“Come with me,” says Roxy, and Jane closes her eyes. She listens to the sounds of the ocean.


End file.
